


Should You Come Across a Body in the River

by scioscribe



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, M/M, References to Suicide, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 22:16:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/667078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A drowning in a gutter in Toulon, a suicide in Montreuil-sur-Mer, Valjean and Marius in the Paris sewers, and Javert poised above the Seine: things fall apart, the center cannot hold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Should You Come Across a Body in the River

**Author's Note:**

> Strictly speaking, I'm taking my characterizations from the 2012 film, but since I just embarked upon my first reading of the Brick--which is lovely thus far--there's a slight chance things are getting filtered in.

The Seine is a black silk ribbon far beneath his feet. This time of year, the water would be warm. To heat water for a bath is a foolish and trivial indulgence and he has never learned to swim, has not waded since childhood, and then only in the gutters of the prison: the warmest water that has ever touched his skin has been rain. It is senseless to think of this now. His skin aches for touch, and should not, but if it must have it, the caress and slap of the water should be the giving in to temptation and the mortification of it all at once.

He wore gloves in Toulon, he remembers, when he helped to drag the dead man from his face-down pose in the rain gutter; in Montreuil-sur-Mer, there were other men to do the hauling. He stood a goodly distance away from the Canche the whole time.

“Look down,” Valjean said. The sewers were so dark, but for his eyes.

Javert supposes, at least, that the river of filth beneath Paris had been warm. Valjean has had all that he has avoided over the years—all the warmth and all the tactility, too, the brutal and fevered brush of skin against skin. He’d carried the schoolboy and cradled the girl, the whore’s child. And now Javert has left him for whatever autumn such warmth will buy him, should he succeed in deferring winter, which no man ever has for long. It is as ridiculous to let him loose as it is to catch him. What life remains for either of them?

His thoughts are ice floes on this summer night: they drift apart and dissolve. He is allowing himself to become distracted, and that has never been his vice.

It was not his vice in the sewer. From that place, he has no conscious memory of thought at all. He remembers calling Valjean a man of mercy and he remembers the smell of shit—and knows that he can, despite having curbed his upbringing from his mouth as roughly as if he’d inserted a horse’s bit between his teeth and tongue, call it nothing else, not now that he has come at last to calling everything by its name.

The man of mercy spoke to him of justice in the river of shit and somehow he did as he was asked to do: he looked down at the schoolboy plastered with his surroundings, sure to die of infection if he did not bleed out, and the slight weight of his medal was still against his fingertips somewhere in his mind, but that was not thought, and the impossibility of stopping Valjean was not thought. It took place somewhere in his chest and throat and was not rational and it is too late, now, to pretend that the contradiction between what he must do and what he must do was not _felt_ , was not a physical thing.

Touch, at last, and unsurprisingly from Valjean, or as near a touch from him as was possible, and meant, surely, in kindness, as Valjean insists he meant everything.

In Toulon, when he wore gloves—Valjean was there, too. Always Valjean. The chase is turned and he feels pursued, by Valjean and by water, by death, and he is running—this flight of thought is an attempt to flee, it is unworthy of him, but so it goes.

 

 

The man’s hair was matted slightly with blood. Javert said, “Clubbed.”

“With what?”

“There is always something. A loose stone, a plank from one of the pallets. Prisoners can be endlessly inventive.”

The man in question, 39643, had had his head held down in the thin rivulet of muddy water that made up the prison gutters: it would have been considerable work to hold a strong man in place as he struggled for air. The culprit, as yet unknown, had dodged that labor entirely with a blow to the back of the head, undoubtedly enough to render 39643 unconscious.

His subordinate said, “He fought with Valjean.”

“24601,” Javert said. “Who is too strong to need an instrument of force.” He was a thief, however, and what was theft but an attempt to spare oneself from work? “Nevertheless, it is a sound suggestion. Bring him to me and I’ll have the truth from him.”

That day, excepting the murder, was like any other day: Javert was comfortable in assigning the prisoner’s violent death to a lacuna and allowing that the rest of the proceedings might go unchanged. He saw no reason to move the body away to spare the feelings of a convict. 24601 looked at the dead man for a long time, his face as still as one might expect of either a murderer or a man fallen from the Lord’s instruction, and then he looked at Javert.

“You are younger than many of them,” his superior had said to him when he was first brought on. “Will that bother you?”

“I do not see why it should,” was the answer he had given. “It is the uniform and the weight of the authority behind it that signifies and not the age of the man who wears it.” Nor the relative strength, even with a man as brutishly empowered as 24601. That he was aware of the disparity between them, as 24601 stood before him, was another matter, and only said that he was not a fool.

“24601,” he said. “You quarreled with this man. On what subject?”

They were the first direct words he had exchanged with this particular prisoner, though he knew him by sight and by record, and he knew the cast of his features as criminal by nature and by training. He expected the flat denial which came: “I didn’t kill him.”

“Since you disavow it, then my questioning must be done. Is that your line of thinking? I should take your innocence at your word?” He did not wait for an answer. “What was the subject of your quarrel? I will not ask again.”

“I had a piece of sailcloth, as a pillow. He stole it.”

“He was a thief,” Javert said dryly. “As are you. And you should not have been allowed possessions in your cell, that is an oversight that it is a pity it took a criminal to correct. For a first offense, there is no punishment to be had beyond the removal of the object, but consider the record of your wrongdoing established.”

“On my confession alone,” 24601 said.

“Guilt outs one way or another, yours through your lips, but that makes it no less guilty.” He walked to the dead man’s pallet and, looking underneath it, dislodged the fragment of sailcloth. 24601 would have thought to look for it, surely, if he had been in the cell before now. He nodded at the filthy cloth and said, “You may go.”

“I didn’t kill him!”

“Should you have done so, you’d have compounded sin with stupidity. Your illegal possession has been noted and you are otherwise dismissed.”

After three days of diligent investigation, it had turned out that another guard—the one, in fact, who had had the information about Valjean’s fight with the dead prisoner so readily to hand—had murdered the prisoner in a fit of pique. Javert took, perhaps, a pleasure greater than necessary in stripping him of his position and bringing him before the court: a man should not betray the office he served. And the man had been, habitually, an inconvenience.

“He was cruel,” 24601 said.

Javert did not mean to spare him a glance. It was not specifically against in defiance of order for a prisoner to speak unspoken to, but it was irregular, and frequently punished: Javert nevertheless had a certain affection for irregularities, and so turned his head.

“He’s been removed and will stand trial.”

Valjean—and while he could not fault himself for knowing the man’s name, he did not mean to apply it—licked his lips and said, “No one else would have done it.”

“I took no action for your sake,” Javert said. “He breached the law. And you were given solitary, were you not, for a second possession incident, the sailcloth stolen back again? I should not have been so hasty in ruling out stupidity.” He did not reflect—standing high above the Seine, years later and miles away, he knows he did not reflect, and somehow it pains him—on how the man had given away that he had not used his cudgel until the prisoner had been struggling for some time. He did not think about the pain of drowning, the deliberation of it, or the cruelty of it, in return for a grievance no greater than mild irritation with the man’s smell. In any case, all of Toulon kept that odor.

He did not think, either, about the way the guard’s face had fallen in upon itself as he had felt Javert’s trap close around him; he did not think about the pleas made to him.

He did not think of anything at all, though he kept his smile, and he walked away from Jean Valjean without further comment. It would be years before he spoke to him again and still longer before there was another body in the water, another damned body and another damned river between him and Jean Valjean.

 

 

“Suicide only, Monsieur le Maire.”

Madeleine held his hat in his hands and his expression, as he looked at the body drying on the bank of the Canche, was grim and white-lipped. It was something that toyed with Javert’s suspicions and let the tide was them away for a moment, because it seemed impossible for a man on Jean Valjean’s casual criminality to be so disconcerted by death. He permitted himself for the day to see only Monsieur Madeleine beside him and at once something shifted inside him like a wheel turning, its teeth enmeshed with the teeth of another, until soon he felt different entirely.

Eyes on the corpse to spare himself from looking at Madeleine’s face, he said, “The man must have been deranged.”

“It should not be called ‘only,’” Madeline said. “What would drive someone to this, it should not be lessened.”

 

 

The wind above the Seine is warm, as it was—and heavy, almost—above the Canche. But it is brisk, too, and burns his face. He says, “I do not lessen it,” and the darkness swallows up his words.

 

 

“God will judge him,” Javert said.

“God will judge us all.” It was the only hint of sharpness he had had from Madeleine in all this time and he was surprised, without his suspicions, how little defense he had against it. “God will pity him as well, no doubt, as he will pity us all, or so we should devoutly hope.”

Javert inclined his head. It did not surprise him that Madeleine would deny mortal sins, or at least will himself away from believing them: had the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer himself been God, undoubtedly he would have been forever drawing souls forth from perdition. A cosmic disarray. “You may hope so, Monsieur le Maire.”

Valjean pressed a hand to his face. “I may. Forgive me, Javert, I spoke harshly. The day is hot.”

“I could make a report to your office at your will,” Javert said. “There is no need for you to be out.”

“I would like to see it done and over with.”

There was mud on the dead man’s cheek—was he so old, by Montreuil, to have noticed that? But above the Seine, he remembers it, and so it must be so—and it was still damp. Would Madeleine wait for it to dry? “Should you wait for providence to close the book, you will wait some time. One thing leads to another, and Monsieur le Maire, surely you have other responsibilities to tend to. The man was weak, it is to be pitied, should you be so inclined, but weakness unto death is not a crime that can be prosecuted. He is gone already.”

Madeleine’s smile was dry. A drop of sweat on his upper lip. “Am I an inconvenience to you?”

“Monsieur le Maire could never be that.”

“Were I not mayor, were I man only—”

Javert bowed. “That is a life we do not know. I suspect I would be more perplexed by your presence, then. But in this world, you may do as you please, and I am at your service regarding the disposal of this man.”

“Has he any family? Someone who might be told of his loss?”

“I should hardly think they would take comfort in knowing of the manner of it,” Javert said. “But I will make inquiries and discover what people, if any, he called his own.”

“I don’t doubt the likelihood of your success.” Flattery in the cloak of kindness was surely Madeleine’s stock in trade, along with unwarranted charity, but the likelihood of Javert’s success was, he himself knew, relatively plain: he accepted the compliment as fact, with a lowered head. The air, he thought, in a disconnected way, really was quite thick, even above the river. And it was far too warm.

“You might,” Madeleine said, “conceal the exact means of his departure. If there is someone who loves him still.”

“That is not in me,” Javert said. “Even at your request.”

 

 

It occurs to him that there will be no one who will think to conceal his fate from Valjean. That is a thought colder than the water below would be even in winter. He is thinking such strange things, hesitating so long: he is becoming intemperate in his last moments. And what would Jean Valjean care for the death of Javert?

 

 

In Toulon, there was rain that fell on him and Valjean alike.

In the sewer, even Jean Valjean could not have produced the miracle of making himself clean again.

In Montreuil, Madeleine hoped that even the dead could be forgiven their last trespasses.

 

 

“You are incapable of bending,” Madeleine said. “I suppose I knew that by now. Then it is your task to find those to whom I shall give the news.”

He had thought Madeleine too upright to lie, but even Valjean’s bishop, a goodhearted if mistaken man, had told his lie of supposed mercy, and this was more of the same. “As you like.”

“What do you suppose drove him to it?”

“You must know I cannot know.”

“You must suppose I guess your curiosity.”

Javert chuffed slightly through his teeth, which attracted Madeleine’s attention slyly.

“As I thought. You have your theory?”

“For the death of a man I’ve met only dead, and of whom I know nothing? You ask me for speculation only. I won’t have it misconstrued.”

Madeleine nodded with mock gravity. “I should not dare.”

 

 

But no, no—he has it wrong. It seems to him now that they did not have that conversation standing beside the Canche, for Valjean would not have been so free with him with the body still at their feet. It must have been later, in Madeleine’s factory, when he was asked to find the family of the deceased. That too would account for the banked coals of his own skin, the impossibly sticky heat of the day: they must have been inside. He had, somehow, convinced Madeleine that there was no role for him there beside the water.

He does not recall his suspicions about the suicide of the man in Montreuil. He does know the truth: the man came as far as he could, and from there, before him, all possibilities stretched equally into darkness. His forlorn hope for the pity of Valjean’s God—reason enough to leap, to falter, to drown.

 

 

“I only smashed his skull in,” the guard said, trembling, “after he started to struggle, and I wasn’t trying to kill him, I wasn’t, I was only playing a bit. Saying he would have to get clean, because—because the _smell_ on him—You should understand. You know that some of them aren’t fit to live, should be drowned in the gutter, Javert, you must know it, have mercy, man.”

 

 

Have mercy.

 

 

“Look down,” Valjean begged him. Jean Valjean, the end of all his roads, covered in shit and filth, with a nearly dead boy, his last counterfeit Lazarus, at his feet. All those bodies in all those rivers. And Javert looked; looks. There is no further back he can go and so down is all he has left. It seems there may have been other ways, once, but those are darkness now.

 

 

Here he has the water, and that is something, at least. He has the river, and that is a homecoming.

The toes of his boots stretch out past the stones.

Only: “Javert,” and he knows the voice and turns to it, as he’s been turning for so many years, a history made of water that slips away as he tries to touch it, and he says in answer, “I thought perhaps. It would seem inevitable. Therefore I waited.”


End file.
